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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28010523">Poor Man's Riches</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz'>GraceEliz</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ro29/pseuds/Ro29'>Ro29</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Lives Happen in Spirals [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Boba Fett's Dad Panic 404 Emergency Reboot, Boba Fett's Long Awaited Series Of Personal Crises, Boba is now genre-savvy and drags the author through the sand, Gen, Second Person, Second Person Boba Fett, a surprise third installment to this series, tattooine, unrelated to The Mandalorian, which he attempts to avoid by way of the Sarlacc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:35:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,340</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28010523</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ro29/pseuds/Ro29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Boba Fett.<br/>The skin of your hands is paper-dry.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Boba Fett &amp; Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Lives Happen in Spirals [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2051664</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>New SW Canon Server Works</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26892169">sins of the father</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ro29/pseuds/Ro29">Ro29</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>picks up immediately post-Blood is Thicker.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Your name is Boba Fett.</p><p>Adrenaline is a funny thing, really, especially for your advanced systems: you take longer to come down form it, but the crash, oh, the crash. You sit on the floor of your bunk-room surrounded by old plates and thinking about how none of them are truly yours. The skin of your hands is paper-dry. Slowly, you put down your rags. Bly’s plate is as white as it’ll ever get, your father’s plates cleaned again, you never ever touch Fox’s plates. Was theirs, too? They worked harder than you did as children; you were trained but they were - the word sticks in your brain - tortured into spectacularity. Did your brothers have paper-dry skin, too? Did it tickle them as it does you when you run your thumb in circles across the undersides of your other fingers? Did they live long enough to know what paper feels like, or are you the only one to have received such <em>honour</em>?</p><p>Fox probably knew paper. You settle your back against the bunk, draw a blanket around yourself, then one over your legs; you’re no deprived kid anymore. When would he have done? Maybe it was paperwork he was made to carry. Or letters like the one you were given when he died – or is that something new? They wouldn’t have bothered to send paper-letters during the war, not when clones were disposable and everywhere. Not even a comm, they had to rely on the news from each other to find out if anyone was alive or dead. So maybe, then, you draw up the situation in your mind: a Senator who had a friend in the GAR, someone nice if there were any nice ones around, and he knew about them, so he got them a paper letter, and the Senator was a nice one who said thank you –</p><p>There is sand in your wrinkles, you realise as you wipe angrily at your face. Did they get old enough to have wrinkles? If Wolffe is still around, does he have the same wrinkles as you or is he older, deeper creases and those smile-lines you all inherited from Buir? You are thirty-two. How old do you look, though? Forty? More? It’s not like your life has ever given you reliable ways for judging age even in humans. You are only a clone.</p><p>You are Boba Fett. When people hear the name Fett, now, they think of you, in old battered armour that is maybe a shade too small but you don’t really care, because who can lay a hit on you and your paper-skin?</p><p>Stars. You’re really fixated on this paper-skin thing.</p><p>You lift Fox’s plates to the corner beside your own and get in bed.</p><p>You get back out of bed with a disgruntled sigh and go outside into the cold desert-night air and kneel and pray up to the sky: thank you. Thank you for letting me find the Skywalker-child and daughter of Alderaan before something horrible happened to them or me. Help me find anyone who is left out there, and help them in turn. Ni alor’ye at aliit.</p><p>Then you get up and go back to bed. You might still have the seed of your faith, but it’s cold out and you’re done playing to someone else’s tune. If the Stars want something from you other than your best efforts to free your brothers then they’d better up their efforts at communication.</p><p> </p><p>Morning comes with nibbling desert-creatures around the base of your ship, easily scared off by loud words and a few rocks hurled in their direction. You have work to do already without them making it worse. Now is the time to assess the damage you can see hints of even in a cursory glance. The Jawas have been through here. With a cut-off curse you hurl your tools to the side and kick out at nothing – not the ship, because you might be hot-tempered but you’re not that hot-tempered, you’re not Cody – in your anger because you are now going to be stuck here on this gods-and-stars-forsaken planet for the foreseeable future. Jawas.</p><p>Damn the bastards.</p><p>And then you check inside and things have been moved almost carefully enough to fool your perfect memory and you can’t find any more jetpack fuel, or when it comes to it the tools you’d wanted to tighten up the operating systems, which means you’re going to need to go find the Jawas and demand your stuff back, or trade for it more likely. Which of course means you need to try and locate something they’ll actually want. You have the plates, of course, but everyone knows better than to lay hands on old armour-plates unless they’re absolutely certain nobody is using them, and given that this is your ship, your brother’s plates are safe unless you decide to trade.</p><p>Sometimes it occurs to you that in Mando’a, this is beskar’gam, which literally means iron-skin, and you wonder whether this means you’re clinging. Is it his skin or his soul in your bunk? Both?</p><p>Those thoughts never get far before you close them down and turn to something less depressingly introspective.</p><p>Practical matters, then: find the Jawas. Find a settlement. Fix the ship. Get off Tattooine.</p><p> </p><p>So in the end you don’t find the Jawas anywhere within a ten-hour hike, and have to walk to the nearest settlement which isn’t even on any maps because as far as you can tell there are ten buildings of which three are bantha huts and one is empty. This does not bode well for your chances of getting off this overheated dustball anytime soon. Somewhere in the childish part of your brain, Bly is telling you to have more patience, but you have always been rather more like Wolffe: short, snappish, and inclined to think the worst. Still, at least it only took four hours to get here, and you have your plates and blasters and body to rely on.</p><p>There is a woman, a human woman, standing on her doorstep, watching you approach. “Hello,” she says when you’re within earshot.</p><p>You halt, tip your helmet, say nothing. Boba Fett is known to be silent and your reputation isn’t going to change anytime soon.</p><p>“Are you lost?”</p><p>“I don’t get lost,” you answer, which is a lie.</p><p>She hums as though she believes you. “What do you need?”</p><p>Where to start. “Parts. Jetpack fuel. The Jawas.”</p><p>With a snort she gestures sharply towards her tiny house. “Come in, then. We’re hospitable in these parts.” She shows you her back. “Come shake the sand off your feet.”</p><p>There is sand in every crease of your body’s papery skin.</p><p>“Do you keep your helmet on always?”</p><p>You incline it slightly. She hums, and moves into a small back room which shows up another life-sign.</p><p>Her voice is raised, as though you’re only human – but then, as far as she knows, you are. Humans can be exceptional too. “My children and I live here all year through, along with the old Twis in the opposite building. Almost everyone else is…” her voice trails off, a child burbles. You have little experience with children. “Transient.”</p><p>All life is transient, you want to say, but Bly’s voice is scolding and Fox’s voice is telling you to be kind, so you don’t.</p><p>She enters the room and seems surprised you’re where she left you. Most bounty hunters, you will admit including yourself, have very poor manners. “You can sit.”</p><p>You hum and don’t.</p><p>“Food, and then your list,” she says almost to herself and the kid in her arms. How old? Two? The baby – kid – is set on the floor with a kiss so full of affection you find yourself suddenly missing Buir and Fox with an ache like being stabbed in the chest. “I make a mean dehydrated rations stew. Got womp-rats in.”</p><p>You wonder, as she disappears into a second room you assume is the kitchen, when rat and ration stew became so appetising.</p><p>As you eat, with her and her three children at the low table which has no chairs but is low enough to be comfortably reached from the floor, she speaks up, still not looking at you. It’s easier if she’s concentrating on feeding the children, easier to mind your own manners if she’s fondly chastising the youngest as he babbles. "Mandalorians can be good people and bad people,” she says as if you’re not there. You still. Her words strike a cord in you that you try to avoid touching. “Being Mandalorian has - had - nothing to do with who and what any being becomes. Everyone is just a person."</p><p> You scowl. "Unless you're Jango Fett," you say less bitterly than you thought you would. She shakes her head, meets your eyes, and you realise almost with fear that she must be easily your own age under the sun-damage, because she knows who you’re talking about.</p><p>"Even Jango Fett. Even you."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>You are thirty-five. You’ve never been back to Tattooine since, on bounties or business or any reason whatsoever, but still you think of her. Even now, so much later, her words to you ring against your beskar breastplate as you gently brush dust off Fox’s plates. Each being is only a person, the sum of their choice and reaction to what they’ve been through. In mando’a there is a saying that means much the same: it doesn’t matter who your Buir is, only the Buir you’ll be.</p><p>Unless your Buir was Jango Fett.</p><p>Anyway, you tell yourself again, so often it may as well be your life’s refrain, it isn’t like you’ll have children of your own. Does it matter then, the father you would be? No. Therefore, your justification flows, the consequences of your actions are between you, your targets, and hyperspace. Nothing needs to hurt in your chest. Not anymore.</p><p>Why are you going back?</p><p>You land on the dunes behind the settlement and its ten-turned-twelve buildings, an hour out by foot so as to not waste jet-fuel but also to prevent any nosy locals thinking you’re an easy target (they’d be extremely stupid to even make an attempt). As you walk over the shifting sand, high alert for snakes and Jawas and all other hunting beasts – there’s a Krayt Dragon nearby, or at least, there was, when you worked Hutt jobs – you push the question down, down, down, where you keep your guilt about Ponds and the knowledge of your monstrosity and your fear that has driven you since the day your Buir’s head rolled in a swoop of purple light.</p><p>Why are you going back?</p><p>“Boba Fett,” you hear a young voice ask, wondering, yet somehow certain in the way the young seem to be. “You came back.”</p><p>It is the oldest of her children, you see her eyes in that young face, now – ten? Eight, perhaps? No, she’d seemed to be around seven when you were here before, so ten it is. The age you were when your life ended and began again. You don’t bother with a response.</p><p>The kid seems to hesitate. “She isn’t home, it’s just us until she gets back from Espa.”</p><p>Something in you pauses at that. Perhaps it is time to admit that you didn’t come here on business, that this hunt isn’t a haphazardly concocted excuse to see the one being who has ever made you feel like your face, name, past, doesn’t matter – or is weighted differently. All she did was give you a bowl of stew and the use of a sonic shower, and talk to you. All she did was somehow push a needle straight into your heart that you haven't moved in the three years since you left Tattooine behind. Bly kicks you in the brain and demands you do something. Wolffe calls you an idiot. Cody thinks you should go for it and Fox says nothing and you wonder when your brothers became voices in your brain; or if you’ve just finally lost the grip completely.</p><p>“You could – you could come in and eat,” she offers tentatively, tiny fingers knotting into each other.</p><p>“Thank you,” you rumble and her relieved smile makes you uncomfortable but you don’t know why, until you place your hand on the blaster hilt and her breath catches, but she must be made of the same sun-leather as her mother.</p><p>She turns her back and the knots you hadn’t realised were low in your stomach relax, until you hear the squeals of small children and realise you are now a responsible adult, at which point the panic returns. There is a reason you do not have Foundlings of your own. “I,” you begin, not entirely sure what you want to say – seriously, what the kriff is wrong with you, a midlife crisis? – but then cut off when she looks up over shoulder in curiosity.</p><p>This child is tiny.</p><p>“We only have rat and ration stew.”</p><p>Fate has it out for you. Your life has become a holonovel. Sometime in the next hour, the gaggle of loosely competent baddies will turn up and you’ll save their mother from a dodgy character just as you plan to leave.</p><p>You have got to stop watching holotelevision.</p><p> </p><p>The settlement is cold at night. Of course the desert is cold anyway, but this little home is remarkably cold. The three children sleep together in one bed under most of the blankets but they’re still cold, you have perhaps tuned in your HUD to their lifesigns, which says something about you that you don’t actually want to hear. As it was last time, those years ago, the stew was fine, nothing particularly tasty but infinitely more palatable than ration packs. The house is boring and normal and filled with the sort of nondescript clutter your ship often accumulates.</p><p>Trying to think about your surroundings only distracts you from shivering children for a handful of minutes, then you think about Fox, and being told to be kind, and you rise.</p><p>This is how to be Boba Fett: you need to be small and three and loved and happy and then be five and break a promise and realise you are just one of millions, then spend the rest of your life with that fear fuelling you and the determination growing low in your gut that no child will ever have to fear the way you did. You need to be thirty-five and growing old fast and lie your cloak over the bodies of three tiny children, and feel something inside you move at the soft murmurs of gratitude and the half-spoken echo of the word <em>mother</em>.</p><p>You need to have a new fear and leave before the kids awake, just after the first sun has risen, before you have to accept that you just watched over them the whole night just-in-case-nothing even though they spend lots of their time alone and there is nothing in this tiny empty place that would hurt them. So here you are, trekking reluctantly to the outcrop of rocky mountains and pretending to yourself that you’re not running away from fear and change, pretend that the mission you took upon yourself which is as finished as you will ever make it is calling you.</p><p>There she is: a white-robed shortish figure, slender atop the scudding speeder-bike. Behind her is another outline, slightly larger than her though smaller than you slightly. You don’t like that. Your eyes follow the bike until she reaches her home and the children come running out to her, barely visible with how tiny they are, and it is only your HUD that allows you to see that she’s turned to where the girl is pointing vaguely in your direction.</p><p>She gets on the speeder.</p><p>The other person throws their arms in the air and stalks off.</p><p>The speeder scuds across the golden and yellow sand towards you, and you start to climb down to where she’ll be able to see you easier when she gets nearer. You make yourself vulnerable, and you don’t even actually know her name, and your brothers and Buir and everyone who’s ever trained you into anything is probably ready to kick you across the dunes all the way to Eisley, but they are not here: you are. You are alone and monstrous and this woman had no fear and knows you are and who your father was and you are curious.</p><p>“Hello,” she finally says, after the dust has settled and you’re facing each other over maybe five metres of blank sand. “You need something?”</p><p>You hesitate, because some part of you wants to see her without your second-skin but that reeks of vulnerability. “Do you?”</p><p>For a second she says nothing and neither do you, as if there are too many words to be said and yet somehow nothing to actually articulate. “You left your cloak on their bed.”</p><p>“I have another,” you say quietly.</p><p>She is silent just long enough for you to begin questioning yourself. “You are a good man, Boba Fett,” are the words you never expected to hear, “I think you’ll make a good father.”</p><p>That little twist from last night with the cloak, from this morning when you gently tucked them in and almost dared to brush their hair back from tiny sleeping faces with your paper-skin hands, from watching over the little house at distance and seeing the children come and look around the settlement; it’s back and fierce. Longing.</p><p>It’s longing.</p><p>Like when Fox died. Like when you were small and cradled in your brothers’ affection and planning to live. Like when you would find brothers safe and happy.</p><p>You want, you suddenly understand, to know who you are, to be soft and safe, and unpressured. “Thank you.”</p><p>She shakes her head. “Are you available?”</p><p>For fatherhood? What? That seems fast –</p><p>“There’s a sarlacc.”</p><p>Oh. That makes significantly more sense. “Where?”</p><p>Twisting at the waist, she points deeper into the Dune Sea. “It ate one of the young ones a few months ago. We’ve been trying to either find someone to get rid of it, or a different bore-hole, but water is scarce.”</p><p>“Can you take me to it?”</p><p>“Hop on,” she says, so you do, and she is slight against you and Cody is making lewd encouragements and you wish your brothers’ voices in your mind would hold their peace a bit longer.</p><p> </p><p>“Boba!”</p><p>You are distracted, trying to shoot the thing in the sensitive tongue, and that’s why you’re blindsided by her scream, by the way she falls and then you realise the sarlacc has wound you both in, let you close enough to grab, you can only save one of you and it must be her because she has children and children, Mandalore or Tattooine or Clone, are sacred.</p><p>You shoot the tendril holding her wrist and it lets her go and someone screams and then everything is speed and sand:</p><p>And this is where it ends, then, this is how you go, the last of your family the last of your brothers and after all you have done and survived and the horrors you leave in your wake like a comet's tail –</p><p>Falling.</p><p> </p><p>Coming too happens in increments, so slowly you don’t really register when it is you wake up, dark enough you’re confused in the minutes it takes to remember what happened. The walls, if that’s what they are, are dark and your helmet is coming loose but what has you shuddering in terror is the tendril yanking at Bly’s gold-on-white thighplate; you won’t lose him, won’t lose the reminder of when you were a child in a war who was loved by people who could understand. Your hand is on your blaster before you think, and the creature screams and you are inside it and all you hear is the scream the noise of it echoing inside your bones like the clang of beskar-on-beskar rings through air.</p><p>The fire reignites in your belly, that rage, and you realise what it is that you’d lost: the mythosaur. You are a mythosaur, you just forgot it for a while.</p><p>And mythosaurs?</p><p>Mythosaurs don’t get eaten by carnivorous plants. Mythosaurs are saviours, protectors and guardians just like Mandalorians should be, and okay, maybe now is not the time to be having cathartic realisations of your identity, but hey, now or never, right?</p><p>Clock’s ticking, you tell yourself, and wrench out of the grasp of it’s tentacles. You land heavily on your feet, almost buckling down to your knees, almost hiss at the pain but you do not. This is how to be Boba Fett: see the odds stacked against you and ignore them; spit in their face and pull out a blaster or two and fuel up the flamethrowers. Be five and crying and thirty-five and closer to death than you have ever stepped, and look around you in the dark and be almost overwhelmed by how fast your brain reworks until you can almost taste the acids of it, hear the screams so distant, smell the traces of the youth who passed this way a few months ago.</p><p>You had forgotten, what it meant to have been built better. They used to call it battle-haze, the place your morals and conscience go to when you’re surrounded by – what was the phrase, on that holo? Fear and dead men. Or, you suppose, your own fear, and your own impending death. Of their own volition your hands strike out at the things your brain processes before your conscious mind, your feet shuffle lightly.</p><p>Is this what they meant, when the Kaminiise used to talk about weapons in their unexpected skins?</p><p>There it is: your jetpack. Flammable, yes? If you remove the fuel caps, let it spill then climb up as far as you can towards the mouth of this beast and then drop a charge…</p><p>Well, says Wolffe’s growl in your head, it’s probably worth a try, right?</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s a glow. You’re not dead. That’s a start. </p><p>“Boba?”</p><p>You try to make a noise; that’s her voice. Her voice, worried and gentle and something a little harsh like – like storms. Like Kamino, the rain there. You find yourself wanting Fox. You want his hand on your hair so you can see if he has paper-skin.</p><p>She makes a high noise, and you feel pressure on your – something. The part of you between up here and the middle bit. Of a sudden the glow is gone, cool grey-black now instead of hot – hot. Heat the colour of Bly. What is the colour?</p><p>It comes back and you remember. Gold. Bly was gold and Fox was red and you loved Fox more than you loved anyone except buir but buir wasn’t there. “Bly.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>You can feel the darkness from inside rising up, taking you down into the depth of sleep, and you want to say something but you don’t know what and there’s a voice asking for ori’vod and it must be yours but you’re not making a sound. The dark is here, and you sink into it.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p> </p><p>“Mama, is he going to be okay?”</p><p>A shaken breath, a small hand on your head. “I hope so.”</p><p>“Is he going to be our dad?” The same voice, a tiny one, high and something in you is cut to the bone, but you can’t quite claw out of the blackness; there is a haze around you. The Little is safe and so you can go back down.</p><p> </p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Time has passed. You feel the hunger, no thirst, but the hunger like a hole in you, and the pain. Harsh stinging, all over your body, and you hate the blanket and want it off, its scratching fibres and weight.</p><p>“Not yet, Boba,” says her voice.</p><p><em>Push your voice out, Boba,</em> encourages buir’s voice, and you can’t ever disappoint him, and if he says you can do it then you can, and so you open your mouth and rasp. “What’s y’r name?”</p><p>She gasps, and her hands are back on your face. “You’re awake!”</p><p>Her hands feel like leatheris. Not paper-dry at all even though you are on somewhere dry. Tattooine. Or something. “No,” you rasp, but what was it you want to say? No what? Stay, that’s what it is. Stay with me or was it let me stay with you?</p><p>“Sleep, Boba,” she soothes, so you do, reluctant, wanting to keep awake long enough to thank her or see her eyes, her hair.</p><p>
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  <br/>
</p><p> </p><p>You wake up enough to register that you don’t need to panic. With the relief spreading over you, relaxing into the bed is easy, spreading out your senses; they seem sharper, somehow. Probably a result of such a deep sleep, the freshness you associate with healing and recovery.</p><p>There is a child sat between your calves, a tiny weight on one  shin which turns out to be a stuffed bantha. The child is playing, seeming safe and happy, as if you’re not awake yet and peeking out between the slightest slits of your eyelids, and he leans down – this is the baby, he must be four now, what was his name – and kisses the bantha then he pats your knee, and his tiny voice says, “Boba is gonna be our dad.”</p><p>And something, down where you hold your fear and guilt, bursts into fire and leaves you gasping even through the child’s cry of alarm and the rushing feet of his mother and she’s helping you up, but all you can hear is that child’s voice and your own screams for minutes and minutes until. Until what.</p><p>Her. Why is her? Who is she? Who is this woman whose voice slices the nightmare-sand off your bones?</p><p>“Boba?”</p><p>Slowly you open your eyes. You haven’t moved but you could have sworn you did, probably can’t move at all what with your injuries from the sarlacc. What had it done to you? How bad is it? </p><p>She looks relieved, steps towards you. It makes you frown and she stops, so you frown harder, confused, knowing the understanding is right there past the haze of illness. Being a CC means you’re faster, you’re supposed to heal quicker, you shouldn’t be still bewildered by why she was far away and then stopped coming to you. Something in your head is telling you that she’s meant to be next to you, but that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t even know her name.</p><p>“Boba?”</p><p>“What’s your name?”</p><p>The relief looks wrong because she shouldn’t have been worried. “Bria.”</p><p>She’s still there. “Here.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>You force your voice harder, more insistent. “Come here.”</p><p>Bria – Bria, Bria, three repetitions to burn her into your brain – crosses the room quickly to you and her leather-hands are on you again, your brow, your shoulder. “You should lie down,” she prompts gently, eyes so worried and lips tight, but you shake your head, sick of being prone. Two days or whatever is plenty of time, right? It was only a sarlacc.</p><p>“Up,” you croak, but she shakes her head firmly. </p><p>As she pulls up the blanket again, despite your grimace because you hate the texture, she continues to talk. “You scared us, crying out like that. If they upset you you don’t have to let the children in here. Nari only wanted to keep you company.”</p><p>Nari. Her son Nari. Bria’s son Nari. Gentle silence floats across the room, building in the inches between you and her, but it’s a silence of more than space. All you have seen, all you have done, is an anchor between you, dragging you down and keeping you steady both at once. “He can stay,” you eventually rasp as she finishes changing the bandages on your shoulder. Strong fingers press deep into your aching collarbones, not reacting when you hiss through your teeth like an angered monkey-lizard. Even as your back clenches with the urge to cast her off and remove all these sensory inputs – seriously, what is this blanket made of to be so unbearably itchy? – she doesn’t move away, simply shifts so that if you jerk upright you won’t smack her in the face.</p><p>Her fingers linger in the crook of your collarbone; the right side, where you can almost feel your body working to heal up something torn. “I don’t like the feel of this.”</p><p>
  <em>How the feck’d you break that, Boba? We’re close enough to indestructible and don’t you try claim you’re unaltered, we all know they lied about that. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I didn’t mean to.</em>
</p><p>“I broke it when I was twelve,” you rasp, remembering the terror when Fox fell, the fear, the instinctive speed and grasp and subsequent tear of most of your shoulder. “Don’t like to talk about it.”</p><p>Bria frowns, brows tight. “There’s something wrong with it I think.”</p><p>Yeah, you wouldn’t be surprised. It turned out that you were payment to Buir, and when he died you “reset” back to Kaminoan property – not that they really care. No, the big problem was the lack of people willing to treat your injuries. Boba Fett had developed a reputation fast, and it was not a good one. </p><p>“Wait, is your body healing itself?” she asks with a little confusion, pressing her hands back against the sarlacc acid-scabs.</p><p>“Doesn’t every body?”</p><p>“Don’t get smart at me, Boba,” Bria warns, but there’s a smile twitching across her face, and you think – beautiful. She is alive and free and unhaunted and beautiful. “I’m sure these were worse last night, you’re healing unnaturally fast.”</p><p>You shrug. Eventually she will find out about how you are a made thing with no idea of what limits exist, fuelled by rage and grief, and then she won’t want you around anymore. Really, considering the blood that may as well be your blood that stains your soul, it would be for the best.</p><p> </p><p>
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</p><p>Nari walks into the room, chewing at his stuffed bantha. “What’d you call your dad?”</p><p>You eye him quizzically. “Buir. It’s mando’a, what the Mandalorians speak.”</p><p>With a slow nod he turns away again, muttering the word under his breath. “Night, Boba.”</p><p>“Goodnight kiddo,” you echo, still a bit confused.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Your first steps are shaky as a twice-stunned Shiny. Crossing the little sick-room should take seconds, less than seconds, but you have to forge every step from fire. One more, then another one, then the next, from the back wall to the sitting-room doorway. </p><p>“You’re doing better than you should,” says the kid. He has his mother’s quirked smile. “What are you?”</p><p>A monster, your conscience says, but you swat it away and grin through the endless aching of regrowing cells and say, “I am a mythosaur. I am Boba Fett.” I am the last of those who remember how the galaxy is supposed to run, I am all that is left of the best men to have breathed and I am nothing more than an striving shadow.</p><p>The kid smiles like he believes you. “Mum says tea’s ready.”</p><p> </p><p>
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</p><p>The oldest girl is in your room again. She seems to be in here a lot; sits with her work, sewing and other little needle-works that make you think of Bly – he would have liked the softness. “So you’ve been to a planet that’s entirely water?”</p><p>“I grew up there.”</p><p>She stares at you as though you’ve told her the moons were hung by your own two hands; as though she believes you, every word of the way. To your ears your tales sound a bit bland, needing detail, needing padded out and explained, but they’re none of them happy. Tales of Buir make you sad; tales of that in-between make you guilty; tales of Fox make you angry because he shouldn’t have died. “And it used to rain?”</p><p>“All the time.” </p><p>Her eyes are far wider than you thought they could ever be as she scooches closer to you, not quite brave enough to sit on the bed like her brothers do; her mother usually stands or perches by your hip where she can examine the bandages. “Can you take me there? Please, Boba?”</p><p>There’s something off about the cadence of your name as it spills from her mouth, but you ignore it. “Maybe one day.”</p><p>She springs up in excitement. “Thank you, buir!”</p><p>And she’s gone before you have chance to respond. She’d tried to call to you buir, that first time; she’d called you dad. Nari must have told her the word. In fact, knowing her, it was probably her or her mother’s idea. Buir. Can you be a buir? Do you actually know how to do that? It isn’t like you have any experience with it whatsoever; you never even did Littles duty like you know most of your brothers did.</p><p>It isn’t like you had a good example, from Buir. Cold fear and desperation does not make a happy child – you were not a happy child. Nowhere have you left anything but fear and suffering; even to your brothers, the ones you loved, even Fox who you weren’t strong enough to save. Cold fear and desperation is all you know.</p><p>You will not have these children look at you how you looked at Buir.</p><p>You will not wait around to let them reach that point.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I need to go,” you tell her, and she just stands there and looks at you. “I can’t – I can’t be what they need.”</p><p>Bria sighs. “You already are, Boba. You fit in well here.”</p><p>You are made up of the sacrifices of your <em>vode</em>, made up of the blood of your Buir and the bones of the children turned soldiers turned dead men. You have never been fit for much of anything other than what you have made yourself; and you made yourself into a monster. Didn’t you? You sat in the cell and knew it then, you knew it before that, and now you have been spat out of hell itself. </p><p>“I’m not fit for anything.”</p><p>Bria looks at you and it makes something ugly well up inside of you, something desperate and needy and made up of a little boy turned cold turned monster. It’s something like longing and it has no place in this, no place with you and your monstrous soul and these precious people who look at you and call you buir. Call you Boba as if it is precious, a little like Buir used to, before the — well, just before.</p><p>Your name falls out of their mouths like it is water, like it is sweet and safe and warm.</p><p>You are not that, you know that, and you shouldn’t stay, shouldn’t keep lying to them, letting them treat you like that because you aren’t fit for it.</p><p>But, you’ve always been too selfish, and there is something in you that aches like a bruise, like a sweet thing pressed into skin to force you to remember it. You aren’t fit to be a parent, but you don’t really have to be a parent to stay, do you? </p><p>Bria’s eyes watch you, maybe sad, maybe cautious.</p><p>You clench your fists, think of paper-dry skin and holo dramas and cliches and plot twists. </p><p>The brave hero always stays, in the end, throughout the whole journey he is always running ahead, always has to go, go, go. But, in the end, he stays.</p><p>You are not a hero, and you are not particularly brave, but you are Mandalorian and you really have been watching far too many holo-dramas, because you think of paper-dry skin and monsters made from children and blood and bone and <em>vode</em>; think of children with soft hearts and calloused hands turned soldiers turned corpses; think of these small children looking up at you and calling you buir as if you are worthy of it; think of Bria and her soft eyes and calm voice and gentle hands.</p><p><em>This is the part where you should stay</em>, the Bly from the past whispers in your head, eyes warm and face soft. Soft, soft, always too soft. Bly was soft and kind and held everything the war threw at him in the lines of his shoulders, the palms of his hand. He was soft until he wasn’t anymore, kind until there was nothing left of him, there until he wasn’t and until his General fell and—</p><p>All you have left of Bly now, to hold in your paper-dry hands and twisted heart, is armour and memories and you want to be cruel and ask whether it worked for him. Want to rip your way into the past and find your too soft brother with kind eyes, who looked at his General like she was his world, and ask whether that love, that softness, saved him. You want to rip out his heart, or maybe your own heart and see if the love there is written with protections.</p><p>The Bly in your head wants you to stay, and maybe you are going crazy or maybe your past has come back to haunt you or maybe you’ve been watching more holo-dramas than you thought. </p><p>But, Bly whispers ‘<em>stay’</em> and if you look past Bria’s face, you think you can half see the images of Bly and Fox and Wolffe and Cody, all standing together. Looking like they did in your softer memories. </p><p>You meet Fox’s soft eyes and neutral face, and firm, warm hands. Watch Wolffe scowl at you like he wants to yell, like he wants to shake some sense into you and drop you in the sand until you get the point. Look at Cody and his raised eyebrow, scar on his face and arms crossed, eyes kind and face set.</p><p>You blink and they are gone and Bria is still standing there, patient and kind and in the house you know the children are waiting and you aren’t fit to be a parent but—</p><p>You think that, maybe, you could try.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>and that, as they say, is that. All love and adoration to Ro for conquering this chapter.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And that I suppose is that, no? I never intended to write any of this but Ro is fabulous and I couldn't resist and then I couldn't stay away, because there is something about writing a character second-person. It's just so involving, somehow.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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